


Elizabeth Penderwick's Magnum Onus

by rayyy



Category: The Penderwicks Series - Jeanne Birdsall
Genre: Angst, Gay Epiphany, Survivor Guilt, i promise it won't be as depressing as those tags look, see that's better right, sister bonding, undiagnosed mental illness, will add more character tags as I accumulate them
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 09:00:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17915828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rayyy/pseuds/rayyy
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Batty has a lot of flaws, but they're endearing ones. Like how she's always got an earbud in, and she sometimes makes herself late to school saving worms from drying out on sidewalks. All of Lydia's classmates wish she was their big sister; all of Martin's colleagues wish they had a daughter like that. If you talked to Batty, however, she might tell you something different.In which the main conflict of In Spring never gets fully resolved. Instead, Batty internalizes her negative feelings and comes to terms with the wrong truth. Fixing things may take a while.





	Elizabeth Penderwick's Magnum Onus

**Author's Note:**

> chapter title from the foo fighters' song "The Sky is a Neighborhood"  
> go listen to it

 

Jane looked up at the sound of the screen door banging on the hinges. She had left the actual door open on purpose, enjoying the simple view across Gardam Street, the vivid blue sky and the last of the dead leaves adorning their neighbors’ trees. It wasn’t any warmer today than it had been the rest of December, so she was wearing her winter jacket.

Batty slammed both doors closed, though. Taking quick, long strides through the kitchen, she slung off her backpack with surprising force. It flew some distance and landed in the living room.

“Bad day?” said Jane uncertainly. No response.

She considered pushing the subject. Jane had always felt her relationship with Batty was lacking something—as the true middle children, surely the most artistic, and the worst at math in the family, they really had a lot in common. But the missing piece evaded her. It wasn’t that she and Batty didn’t get along. Her younger sister had just latched onto Rosalind first and foremost, and then when the family grew, it was harder to compete.

Now Jane was off at college most of the year, and with every lapsed month, it seemed like Batty grew years older and miles more distant. She was fourteen these days. Suddenly she looked uncannily like Rosalind, or a shorter, sullen version, with Skye’s pointy frame instead of Rosie’s softness. The only time she resembled Jane was when she wore the occasional hand-me-down.

Jane was deeply immersed in this train of thought when Batty hollered from the bathroom, “where’s Asimov?”

She blinked, noticing that her laptop screen had gone dark. “I haven’t seen him.”

Batty groaned in frustration. Soon she reappeared in the kitchen to rifle through the cabinets and the fridge.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t even know.” She slumped against the counter for a moment, glared at a clump of bananas next to her. One earbud was in, the other dangling free as per family rules, and Jane could faintly hear her music through the tiny speakers. “Is Skye here yet?”

“No, she gets in around seven.” Right now she’d say Skye’s plane was somewhere over Ohio, if Jane were to guess, but she didn’t think Batty wanted that level of detail.

“Hmf. Good.”

Jane spent a few minutes just observing her sister, wondering if she should incorporate some of Batty into a character in her current story. And if so—which one? There was a delightfully subtle energy to the way her fingers drilled the marble countertop, obviously lost in whatever song she was listening to. Her shoulders jutted up angrily. Dark curls drifted across the worn fabric of her sweatshirt as her head moved in tiny increments. Even though Batty’s back was to her, Jane knew her eyes were closed, just because of the way she held herself. Restless and distracted, maybe pretending to be somewhere else. Perhaps Jane’s protagonist had a cousin in the throes of teenage angst…

“I think I’m going for a walk. Quigley, if anyone asks.” Batty pushed away from the counter and made for the front door.

“Wait,” blurted Jane. “Uh. Don’t be gone too long.”

“Kay.”

 _Screw it,_ she thought. “And, Batty, are you doing okay?”

Batty paused with her hand on the doorknob. She looked at Jane directly, for the first time in their ephemeral conversation, and smiled brightly. “Yeah, I’m alright. You know. Highschoolers are assholes, midterm exams next week, it’s all just—” A vague, airy gesture.

“The onerous gauntlet of youth,” said Jane, completely understanding Batty’s experience and internally applauding her profound power to empathize.

“Sure,” said Batty. “See you.”

“Keep in touch,” Jane said, but the door had already shut after her. The room was becoming too warm to justify the winter coat, so Jane shed the layer and let it drop to the floor. She would hang it up properly once she finished this next passage.

 

Quigley Woods was especially shadowy that afternoon, but Batty shook off her hesitations. So much scared her, all the time—talking to people she didn’t know, talking to people she did know, the chance of a solo in Choir, the fact that Lydia was a six-year-old adrenaline junkie and their dad let her sit on his lap and steer the car anyway—‘the dark’ was not allowed on that list. It was almost real winter, so honestly, what had she expected?

Batty didn’t have time for stupid childish fears.

The Foo Fighters were playing in her ears, from a playlist she’d named “loud hours.” The band was more of an outlier among her music tastes, but she had picked it up from Nick Geiger, of all people, and it was exactly what she needed at the moment. _Heaven is a big band now, gotta get to sleep somehow. Bangin’ on the ceiling, bangin’ on the ceiling, keep it down._

Jane had been correct, though she would never know. Batty was having a bad day. First of all, Skye was coming home from California, and because college students had ridiculously long vacations, that meant she was facing a month of co-habitation with her most contentious sister. Worse, Rosie wouldn’t be here to act as a buffer until Christmas, and Jane was leaving shortly after that to go to Europe, for boyfriend reasons. Batty shuddered at the thought.

That knowledge had put a scowl on her face from the minute she awoke that morning. All through the rest the day, she felt ambiguously sick. Her symptoms ranged from dreadful nausea, to a thin headache, to an irritating ache between her shoulder blades, doubtlessly the result of unchecked tension. She didn’t bother going to the nurse. Batty had days like this, and experience told her that there wasn’t much she could do. Finally, like always, her voice had shrunk to a whisper by lunchtime.

The third bad thing was the least anger-provoking, but perhaps the most annoying, simply because it was her own fault. Batty’s grades were slipping again. Since elementary school, they had stuck to a reliable pattern—as soon as she dared to feel smart, she forgot the date of a big test, or didn’t follow directions on a lab report, and everything snowballed again.It was difficult to care much when there was music to make, books to read, and woods to walk. Still, it stung when the dinner table conversation turned to her sisters’ academic successes, which had continued with apparent ease for as long as Batty could remember.

And her goddamn Physics class had a way of getting resentment to flare like it never had before. Mr. Chalkey was—well. Neither here nor there.

Batty took a deliberate breath, trying not to dwell on it, trying to draw the crisp air into the depths of her lungs where it never seemed to reach. Quigley Woods tasted sweet, like orange leaves and rotting wood. She slowed her pace and tried to—what would Jane say?— _meander_. Sometimes she could turn an angry walk into carefree dancing, she had discovered, by letting her legs go where they wanted rather than listening to her brain. But today it was rough going. Her limbs felt weighted-down, and she moved awkwardly, self-conscious despite the overwhelming solitude.

Eventually, when she was really and truly getting on her own nerves, she took out her earbuds and paused “loud hours.” There was the distant sound of running water. The chirp of squirrels, and the occasional inexplicable cracking sound, the kind of sound that one heard in the woods. Batty imagined foxes stepping on twigs and snapping them in half with their little paws, which beat the odds and made her smile. She crammed her earbuds into the pocket of her jeans and kept walking.

There was yet another matter on her mind today. A big one, and one for which she was entirely unprepared. Batty supposed she had always heard it, that particular song in her head, but never had she listened. Until today. She was a little scared to listen to it now, alone in Quigley Woods. Thoughts were like that. They were terrifying in a way unlike any of the other fears on Batty’s list, because she couldn’t get rid of them, only throw them over and over against the ceiling of her head and see them fall back down into her brain. But just as she’d gone into the woods, Batty collected herself and listened despite the fear. She wasn’t a kid anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> apologies for any mistakes. in my defense i did write this in basically one sitting and i don't ever edit cuz i'm not a fucking nerd. jokes aside, i wanted to post it fast bc i need to write 4k words of a research paper now, but i might go back when i have the time and fix shit.
> 
> if ANYONE still likes the penderwicks in the year of our lord 2019, and happens upon this fic whilst trawling through the ancient dumping ground that is the penderwicks tag, PLEASE let me know what you think! really! i know it's considered bad form to be a critic on ao3, but i'm asking for it -- i wanna know if batty (or jane) seems OOC, bc i'm self-aware enough to know when i'm projecting but not enough to know when to stop. also if my style is clunky or confusing to read, it's always a concern of mine. 
> 
> and, you know, it's late enough at night that unless i get comment notifications, i might entirely forget about writing this by tomorrow morning. help an old woman out im 17 
> 
> ray xx


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